Guilty of slavery, mother who tried to sell her baby for £35,000

A mother who tried to sell her baby daughter for £35,000 was found guilty of slavery today and told she faces years behind bars.

The married Indian woman planned to abandon the 11-month-old with the buyers, who she had never met, in a hotel room when police swooped.

A Pakistani businessman acted as a middleman, brokering the sale and promising a name change with a fake birth certificate for the new parents. But the purchasers were undercover reporters from a Sunday newspaper, Inner London crown court heard.

Following a series of phone conversations, which were taped, the businessman arrived at the Viking Hotel, Stratford, with the 29-year-old mother and her baby for the handover, on September 22 last year.

Unknown to them, police were listening in the next room. Today the mother and the businessman, who cannot be named to protect the child's identity, were found guilty of conspiracy to commit child cruelty and holding a person in slavery, over the attempt to complete an unvetted adoption for profit.

Christopher Foulkes, prosecuting, told the jury: "Slavery involves exercising over a person any or all of the rights of ownership. No one, not even a parent, is allowed to own another person. You may think that there is no better example of treating someone as if you own them than by deciding, or seeking or agreeing, to sell them."

The plot came to light when the 48-year-old businessman, a successful estate agent, told an associate, Asad Ali, that there was a "baby for sale". Mr Ali told the News of the World.

The woman's 31-year-old husband, who was not the baby's father, was cleared of involvement in the conspiracy. Judge Lindsay Burn remanded the guilty pair in custody for sentencing on May 27.